The billionaire technologist has quietly founded a startup that aims to “bring people closer, simplify communication, and enhance engagement” through artificial intelligence.
By Sarah Emerson, Forbes Staff
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has spent the last few months working on an artificial intelligence project that aims to capitalize on the booming landscape of AI video generation. The startup, which has not been previously reported, was founded last year under the name “Hooglee,” according to sources with knowledge of its development and business materials viewed by Forbes. Schmidt’s family office, Hillspire, is currently financing and housing it.
The billionaire “AI whisperer” has become a sometimes polarizing voice in Silicon Valley and Washington on the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, alternately claiming that it will “double everyone’s productivity,” characterizing these systems as “nuclear weapons of a different kind,” or predicting as he did last December that it may become so sophisticated that “we seriously need to think about unplugging it.”
Several months earlier, however, Schmidt and a small cohort quietly incorporated Hooglee LLC, a company that broadly describes its mission as “democratizing video creation with AI.” Its website, which consists of a single landing page and does not name Schmidt nor any of its staff, claims that it’s “creating innovative solutions that bring people closer, simplify communication, and enhance engagement.” Schmidt declined to comment.
To lead the nascent project, Schmidt has tapped longtime collaborator Sebastian Thrun, a fellow technology veteran who cofounded Google’s moonshot factory and autonomous car unit Waymo. Thrun also created the now-defunct aviation company Kittyhawk, and currently manages Schmidt’s secretive military drone startup, Project Eagle, which Forbes first revealed last year.
Hooglee’s other staffers include former research scientists from Meta’s generative AI lab, as well as Kittyhawk’s former general counsel, according to business incorporation documents and public posts linking these individuals to Hooglee and Schmidt. Last October, former Meta staff scientist Bichen Wu wrote on LinkedIn that he and the team at Centropy — a small startup he founded last year to develop text-to-image video generation models, business records show, which does not seem to have released a public product — would be “joining forces with the legendary Eric Schmidt to embark on a new adventure!” A Google Scholar profile for one of Centropy’s former engineers also lists a verified hooglee.com email address. Thrun and Wu did not respond to requests for comment.
Hooglee appears to be the first artificial intelligence project that Schmidt has personally incubated after investing in a number of AI companies, such as Anthropic and quantum computing startup SandboxAQ. The billionaire, who Forbes estimates is worth more than $26 billion, has also funded an OpenAI grantmaking program and the AI science nonprofit FutureHouse.
Trademark applications filed by Thrun on behalf of Hooglee last September describe its product as both an AI video creation software and a social networking platform. The company’s website also suggests a social component, stating that it hopes “to change the way people connect through the power of AI and video.”
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A source familiar with Hooglee told Forbes that some of Schmidt’s staff have referred to the project as a TikTok alternative, though it’s unclear how the product would compete with one of the world’s most popular social platforms. Schmidt, who helped run Google for more than a decade, once said he’d considered buying TikTok in light of the divest-or-ban law that could see the app prohibited in the U.S. in the next few weeks, but ultimately preferred federal regulation over a ban. During a talk at Stanford University last year, his comments on TikTok again drew attention after he encouraged students to scrape TikTok’s IP using AI: “Say to your LLM the following: Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.” Later on in the discussion, Schmidt clarified that he “was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody’s music.”
It remains to be seen how Hooglee will distinguish itself from incumbents like Runway, which released its first text-to-video generator in 2022, and OpenAI’s Sora, which launched in beta last February and recently became publicly available. Last year, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance debuted an AI video generation app called Jimeng AI to Chinese users. Similar products have also been introduced by Meta, Google and Adobe in recent months.
Despite his latest project, Schmidt has also warned of the technology’s potential harms. At a roundtable hosted by the Institute of Global Politics last March, he urged the industry to do more to address the pernicious problem of deepfakes, a genre of AI videos and images that falsely depict a person’s likeness. “When I ran YouTube, I learned a really important lesson, which was nobody cared what you write, but a video will cause people to kill each other,” he said.
Schmidt suggested in an subsequent op-ed about election misinformation for MIT Technology Review that deepfakes could be thwarted by AI detection systems and the debatable solution of watermarking. It’s unclear whether Hooglee will implement any of these safeguards.
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